Something in this ghastly, fatuous French-Canadian comedy made me regret the cinema auditorium was on the ground floor. I wanted to fling myself, screaming, from somewhere very high up indeed.

The idea is that a cutesy little island community, once dependent on fishing but now crippled with humiliating unemployment, could be in line for a government inward-investment grant to build a factory. But first they have to prove that they are a proper town, and to qualify they have to have a proper doctor among them.

So they bamboozle a Montreal medical smoothie into living there in hicksville, and they must collectively pretend to like all his quirky hobbies, like cricket - and that Anglo-Saxon touch might be intended to recall Ealing comedies and Bill Forsyth films. Of course, the cynicism falls away; he and they fall in love.

Like a semi-house-trained puppy, this film desperately wants to be liked: but the script is glutinous, sentimental and direly unconvincing and the acting is straining far too hard.